An immersive experience
Oakville production an homage to theatre company that lets its audiences wander
Toronto’s about to get Punchdrunk, in a manner of speaking.
Audiences in both London and New York have been blown away by the “immersive theatre” company known as Punchdrunk.
Founded in 2000 by Felix Barrett and a consortium of like-minded artists, it began by exploring classical works like The Cherry Orchard and Oedipus Rex in settings where the audience was free to wander at will, making each experience an individual one. Now it’s Greater Toronto’s turn. No, we’re not getting a visiting company of one of Punchdrunk’s current hits like New York’s Sleep No
More or London’s The Drowned Man, despite the best efforts of several local impresarios to make that happen.
What is on the horizon is a new piece being created by some of the most innovative people on our theatre scene that is a definite homage to the Punchdrunk school of theatrical wonders.
Michael Rubinoff, the associate dean of visual and
Punchdrunk has shown a strong commitment to dance and a desire to keep painting their works on larger and larger canvases
performing arts at Sheridan College, has teamed up with Outside the March’s Mitchell Cushman and Convergence Theatre’s Julie Tepperman for a megaproject with the working title of Brentwood that will open in Oakville in April 2015.
The concept of setting plays outside traditional theatres and letting audiences wander isn’t new. Here in Toronto, Richard Rose’s production of John Krizanc’s Tamara worked with that esthetic as far back as 1981.
But Punchdrunk had several aces up their sleeve, most notably a strong commitment to dance as part of the vision and a desire to keep painting their works on larger and larger canvases.
My first encounter with them was in 2011 in New York, where the company set the town on its ear with Sleep No More, which can best be described as Shakespeare’s Macbeth performed in the style of Hitchcock in a series of five-storey interconnected warehouses masquerading as the kind of hotel you might have found in The Shining.
It’s an exhilarating experience, which I’ve been through three times, each one totally different. It remains the first thing I recommend to anyone coming to Manhattan in search of something unique.
Just recently, I tackled their latest London show, The Drowned Man, which plays out in more than 200,000 feet of space to 600 spectators a night, as it tells of tragedy inside and outside a 1960s movie studio.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment when the lead female character stabbed her husband to death and then approached me, still carrying her weapon. I tried not to flinch as she smeared her bloody hands all over the face mask I was wearing.
Yes, the spectators all wear masks at Punchdrunk shows. It’s like being in a Kubrick film like A Clockwork Orange or Eyes Wide Shut, not a bad choice since those films’ mixtures of violence and sexuality drive these pieces of theatre.
So how will this play out in Ontario? On a somewhat tamer canvas, to be sure.
Cushman and Tepperman will set their show in the building that housed Brantwood Public School in Oakville from 1920 through 2010, when it was closed as part of an urban redevelopment program.
Their concept calls for a final school reunion to turn into a ghostly exercise in time travel, when all nine decades of the school’s existence come back to life at the same time.
The audience of 200 will be free to wander the space according to their own dictates, just like in a Punchdrunk show, while a company of 70 actors, made up of the Sheridan graduates of 2015 and some students from the classes below them, act through the years with a mixture of text, song and dance.
It’s the largest project of this type to date in Canada. It doesn’t reach the heights of ambition that Punchdrunk has scaled, we have to start somewhere. Punchdrunk has proved that this kind of immersive entertainment is what’s needed to turn the under-30 audience, who turn their backs on conventional drama, into devoted playgoers. The last time I went to Sleep No More, I stood next to a wide-eyed 20-year-old, who told me that she came back at least once a month. “Is all theatre like this?” she asked, breathlessly. I regretfully had to tell her that it wasn’t. Not yet, anyway. rouzounian@sympatico.ca